Darwinist Evolution is NOT SCIENCE - First, Darwinism consists of unsupported fairy tales!
Darwinism is anti-science. By use of propaganda and hyperbole and deception and censorship and exaggeration, by hiding evidence and inventing evidence and using grandiose language and even anthropomorphism of molecules or simple organisms, the myth of long ages providing time for the Universe to create itself and then use explosions and mistakes and collisions to build complex and obviously designed organisms, Darwinism turns science on its head! Scientism is not science and vast quantities of hot air will not produce a Universe, information or life.
Fairy tale example number one: How do they explain the creation of the Universe?
When you consider ages of the Universe, the Solar System and the Earth, they are all different questions. Above is a fascinating conjecture, based on both scripture and evidence gathered from scientists observing the Universe, of how the age of the Earth and the age of the Universe might be considered from the point of view of God, the One inspiring the writer to write. But not the kind of conjecture we usually get from Darwinists, he has evidence and he lays out the case for said evidence very clearly.
Some of you may remember the posts made on Dr. Moshe Carmeli's Theory of Cosmological Relativity? Dr. Russell Humphreys used a different explanation for the difference in observed time scales but his ability to solve for and predict planetary gravitational fields, which he accurately predicted long before space missions detected magnetic fields of various planets, turned out to be correct. His White Hole Cosmology Theory does work out in much the same way, or should I say gives us the same approximate ages for the Universe and the Earth as do the the assertions of Schroeder and Carmeli.
Creation science has also made predictions about the Solar System that support the idea of a young Solar System that is about the age of the Earth. If you want to read up on Dr. Humphrey's correct predictions about the magnetic fields of planets? The following link will take you to an online publication from CRSQ Volume 21, Number 3 (December 1984), published BEFORE space missions detected and measured the fields of Mars, Uranus and Neptune and also predicting the rapid degradation of the magnetic field of Mercury. We have to wait until 2015 for the measurement of the magnetic field of Pluto:
"In this paper Dr. Humphreys made predictions about the magnetic fields of Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, well before those magnetic fields were measured by spacecraft. Here we have printed the six predictions (two for mercury) in red font. As of July, 2012, the first five have turned out to be "right on," whereas the expectations of evolutionists were not fulfilled. The last prediction concerns Pluto, which won't be visited by the NASA New Horizons spacecraft until July, 2015. Both evolutionists and creationists expect Pluto to consist mainly of ice (a poor electrical conductor), in which case neither theory would predict Pluto to have a magnetic field today."
After Mercury's magnetic field was detected in the Mariner 10 flybys of the mid-70's, Darwinists downplayed the presence of a magnetic field on Mercury despite the implications for the age of the Solar System. Dr. Humphreys published his findings long before space missions to other planets confirmed the magnetic fields that the Darwinists did not imagine would be there and cannot explain and also predicted the degradation in the magnetic field of Mercury, which was confirmed by later space missions.
Check out Spike Psarris' posts and DVDs concerning the Solar System and also the stars and galaxies and why the stories you were told in school about them were just that, stories!
Now another common Darwinist Fairy Tale is the laughable idea that life can naturally arise from non-life. Why do I say it is laughable? There is a Law of Biogenesis, finally proved once and for all by the great Louis Pasteur that states that life cannot come from non-life. But if it cannot, then life can exist only by miracle and as it happens, the Bible states that life, just as existence, was created by God. Darwinists cannot abide the idea of God and therefore no matter how unscientific the concept, they will propose unscientific nonsense and pretend it belongs in a scientific discussion.
Once a law of science is established it is supposed to remain a law until it is disproven. No one has disproven the Law of Biogenesis and the article below will include links that demonstrate why this is true. There are hard chemical barriers to prevent the raw materials aka building blocks of life from forming in nature AND there is no source for the information found in organisms NOR is there any natural source for designing all the molecular machines found in organisms...So one has to ask why anyone would just toss out a law of science? Obviously for unscientific metaphysical reasons!
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Posted on August 22, 2013 in Dumb Ideas, Intelligent Design, Philosophy of Science, SETI
Origin-of-life researchers assume that intelligently-designed experiments in the lab can inform them about the emergence of life without design – in short, that design proves non-design.
Our online
book and Meyer’s Signature in the Cell have destroyed,
many times over, the imaginations of these origin-of-life Imagineers to the
point that the rubble is bouncing. Suffice it to say that the
Astrobiology fantasyland express continues at full steam (and full funding)
despite literally decades of falsification, from the Wistar Institute study
that Meyer discusses in Darwin’s Doubt, to numerous subsequent
studies and books, even some by evolutionists. Remember when Astrobiology
was rushed into a new government-funded science after an emotional press
conference about the Mars meteorite? The meteorite was later debunked,
but Astrobiology didn’t get ejected with it. Now they are still doling
out millions of tax dollars in a down economy to keep the naturalistic myth
going. Why do thinking people put up with something that is demonstrably
untenable, illogical, and useless? For corroboration (and fun), re-read
our 2/15/07 (“OOL on
the Rocks”) and 1/26/08 (“Pigs
Don’t Fly) entries
Fairy tale example number one: How do they explain the creation of the Universe?
ON THE BIBLE AND FAIRY TALES…ATHEIST FAIRY TALES.
“Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There is no way that this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.”
–Astronomer Allan Sandage, winner of the Crafoord Prize (the highest award in astronomy), discussing the origin of the universe. Sandage is considered to be one of the founders of modern astronomy and was widely regarded to be the world’s greatest cosmologist until his death in 2010. He came to belief in God as a result of his science, as he announced at a conference on the origin of the universe in 1985. He also became a Christian.
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“Those who have magnified more recent controversies about the relations of science and religion, and who have projected them back into historical time, simply perpetuate a historical myth. The myth of a perennial conflict between science and religion is one to which no historian of science would subscribe.”
–Former Oxford University Professor of Science and Religion Peter Harrison.
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“We’ll start right at the beginning: Genesis chapters one and two….Once upon a time, God created heaven and earth in six days and then napped on the seventh.”
…So begins the obscenity-laced tirade Penn and Teller: The Bible is Bull#%@!, which appears on YouTube. In this video, outspoken atheist Penn Jillette (the Penn of Penn and Teller fame) attempts to mock the Bible as a fairy tale only believable to naive people who ignore science. But what Jillette actually accomplishes right from the beginning is something entirely different: He demonstrates just how simplistic and inadequate his understanding of the Bible and science are.
Gerald Schroeder has the rare qualifications of both biblical scholar and physicist (formerly a Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In his book The Science of God. The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom, Schroeder explains how the apparent conflict between a six-day creation and a roughly 15 billion year old universe is caused by a pre-Einstein understanding of time.
Einstein demonstrated that time is relative, and the relativity of time has been subsequently tested and verified thousands of times. As Schroeder notes, the rate at which time flows varies with changes in velocity and with changes in gravity. The Bible, notably, described the relativity of time thousands of years before Einstein, somewhat poetically, in Psalm 90:4: “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”
Regarding the apparent conflict between scientific and biblical accounts of the age of the universe, Schroeder writes:
“A common error in exploring the brief biblical age of the universe relative to the discoveries of cosmology is to view the universe from a specific location rather than choosing a reference frame that embraces the entire universe and retains that universal perspective for the entire six days.
This cosmic clock records the passage of one minute while we on Earth experience a million million minutes. …At this million-million-to-one ratio those 120 million Earth years lasted a mere hour. That’s the peer-reviewed physics and the biblical tradition of this discussion. Now for the modern theology: What does all this mean for the age of the universe? In terms of days and years and millennia, this stretching of the cosmic perception of time by a factor of a million million, the division of fifteen billion years by a million million reduces those fifteen billion years to six days!”
Whoever inspired the Bible clearly understood both the relativity of time and the ratio at which Earth time converts to cosmic time…thousands of years before Einstein. The universe is roughly 15 billion years old from the perspective of Earth time and SIX DAYS old from in terms of cosmic time. Schroeder notes that when he asks his atheist colleagues to explain these facts in atheistic terms, they appeal to coincidence.
Any ideas as to who the inspirer, or rather Inspirer, of the Bible might be?
View the below video to review an experiment which verifies the relativity of time.
Please view MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder’s commentary in the video below or click here to read a condensed version.
Notably, this is far from the first time that the Bible has turned out to be right about scientific issues…although the Bible was not meant to be a science book. The article linked to below provides several instances where the Bible foretold phenomena which were later discovered by science.
A few examples:
1) The universe is expanding. Science has only known this fact since 1929, with discoveries made by the astronomer Edwin Hubble. Many scientists use the analogy of an inflating balloon to describe the expansion of the universe. Thousands of years before Hubble, the Bible referred to the universe as expanding. Isaiah 40:22 says that God “stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.”
2) Air has weight. Job 28:25 says “…when he imparted weight to the wind.”
3) Modern science has very conclusively demonstrated that the universe (or a multiverse, in which our universe may be situated, if you prefer multiple universes) had a beginning…just as described in the first chapters of Genesis…as I describe in Isn’t the Universe Eternal? (Thus doing away with the need for a creator) and Is There a God? (What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?)
This revelation has caused much sorrow among scientists ideologically committed to atheism because, for centuries, most atheists have hung their hat on belief in an eternally existing universe in order to do away with God….no beginning, no Beginner. As the astronomer, physicist, and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Robert Jastrow (a self-described agnostic) put it in his book God and the Astronomers:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
The remarkable, or rather, eerie similarity between the biblical and scientific (“Big Bang”) accounts of creation was perhaps best expressed by Arno Penzias, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to Big Bang astrophysics. Penzias stated to the New York Times on March 12, 1978:
“The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang) are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”
These revelations have caused a flurry of activity among atheist scientists committed to avoiding the problem of a cosmic beginning. Physicist Stephen Weinberg writes on the final page of his classic book The First Three Minutes, “Some cosmologists are philosophically attracted to the oscillating model [of the universe], especially because, like the steady-state [eternal] model, it nicely avoids the problem of Genesis.”
Problem of Genesis?! Philosophically attracted?! Weinberg’s statement should remove any doubt that there are many scientists whose science is guided and shaped by their atheist ideology. This is completely contrary to the scientific spirit of objectivity and to the concept of following the evidence wherever it leads. Imperial College of London astrophysicist Christopher J. Isham comments on this ideological bias, and how it only serves as further evidence that Big Bang science supports theism:
“Perhaps the best argument…that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas…being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.”
But even if atheist physicists were able to construct a model that avoids “the problem of Genesis,” their work in denying God would be just beginning. Physicist Steven Weinberg (a self-described agnostic) comments, in the journal Scientific American, on “how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.”
Similarly, Arno Penzias, the above mentioned winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, writes:
“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.”
In OK…I Want Numbers. What is the probability that the universe is the result of chance?, I point out how the Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose calculated that probability of a universe capable of producing life occurring randomly is 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 (1 with 123 zeros after it). As Penrose puts it, that is a “number which it would be impossible to write out in the usual decimal way, because even if you were able to put a zero on every particle in the universe, there would not even be enough particles to do the job.”
Pointing out the absurd improbability of a universe capable of producing life occurring by chance is known as the anthropic fine tuning argument (discussed in more depth in Is There a God? (What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?)). In order to counter this argument, atheists have resorted to postulating multiple universes. So many universes exist—goes the atheist argument—that it should be no surprise that a universe such as ours, with the absurdly improbable constants and values necessary to enable life, exists. London Times science writer Clifford Longley points out that the desperation of this counter argument illustrates in just how tight of a spot atheists find themselves, in his article Focusing on Theism, (London Times, January 21, 1989, p. 10):
“No such argument can ever be absolutely conclusive, and the anthropic fine-tuning argument stops just short of knock-down proof. For there could’ve been millions and millions of different universes created each with different settings, of the fundamental ratios and constants, so many if fact that one with the right set was eventually bound to turn up by sheer chance. We just happened to be the lucky ones. But there is no evidence for such a theory whatsoever.”
“On the other hand the evidence for the truth of the anthropic fine-tuning argument is of such an order of certainty that in any other sphere of science we would regard it as absolutely settled. To insist otherwise is like insisting that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare because it might have been written by billions of monkeys sitting at billions of keyboards over billions of years. But so it might.”
“But the sight of the scientific atheist clutching at such desperate straws has put new spring in the step of the theists. For the first time in more than a hundred years, they no longer feel the need to apologize for their beliefs. Perhaps now, they should apologize for their previous apologies.”
It must be emphasized that there is no inherent conflict between theism and the hypothesis of multiple universes. From the vantage point of theism, it should seem entirely reasonable that an infinite God might choose to create, well…infinitely. The point of contention, rather, is whether the existence of other universes can serve to explain the fine tuning of our universe…especially when no alternative explanation for the source of these universes has been proposed.
Lastly, atheists present the multiple universe (also known as many worlds) hypothesis as a scientific alternative to the religious belief in God. But because other universes can never be observed or detected from within our universe (only inferred or postulated), the many worlds hypothesis cannot accurately be characterized as a scientific hypothesis. Rather, it can only be characterized as a supernatural or religious alternative to belief in God. And if supernatural beliefs amount to fairy tales, as atheists such as Penn Jillette would have you believe, than the many worlds hypothesis is an atheist fairy tale.
So much for fairy tales.
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When you consider ages of the Universe, the Solar System and the Earth, they are all different questions. Above is a fascinating conjecture, based on both scripture and evidence gathered from scientists observing the Universe, of how the age of the Earth and the age of the Universe might be considered from the point of view of God, the One inspiring the writer to write. But not the kind of conjecture we usually get from Darwinists, he has evidence and he lays out the case for said evidence very clearly.
Some of you may remember the posts made on Dr. Moshe Carmeli's Theory of Cosmological Relativity? Dr. Russell Humphreys used a different explanation for the difference in observed time scales but his ability to solve for and predict planetary gravitational fields, which he accurately predicted long before space missions detected magnetic fields of various planets, turned out to be correct. His White Hole Cosmology Theory does work out in much the same way, or should I say gives us the same approximate ages for the Universe and the Earth as do the the assertions of Schroeder and Carmeli.
Creation science has also made predictions about the Solar System that support the idea of a young Solar System that is about the age of the Earth. If you want to read up on Dr. Humphrey's correct predictions about the magnetic fields of planets? The following link will take you to an online publication from CRSQ Volume 21, Number 3 (December 1984), published BEFORE space missions detected and measured the fields of Mars, Uranus and Neptune and also predicting the rapid degradation of the magnetic field of Mercury. We have to wait until 2015 for the measurement of the magnetic field of Pluto:
"In this paper Dr. Humphreys made predictions about the magnetic fields of Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, well before those magnetic fields were measured by spacecraft. Here we have printed the six predictions (two for mercury) in red font. As of July, 2012, the first five have turned out to be "right on," whereas the expectations of evolutionists were not fulfilled. The last prediction concerns Pluto, which won't be visited by the NASA New Horizons spacecraft until July, 2015. Both evolutionists and creationists expect Pluto to consist mainly of ice (a poor electrical conductor), in which case neither theory would predict Pluto to have a magnetic field today."
After Mercury's magnetic field was detected in the Mariner 10 flybys of the mid-70's, Darwinists downplayed the presence of a magnetic field on Mercury despite the implications for the age of the Solar System. Dr. Humphreys published his findings long before space missions to other planets confirmed the magnetic fields that the Darwinists did not imagine would be there and cannot explain and also predicted the degradation in the magnetic field of Mercury, which was confirmed by later space missions.
Check out Spike Psarris' posts and DVDs concerning the Solar System and also the stars and galaxies and why the stories you were told in school about them were just that, stories!
Mercury's Fading Magnetic Field Fits Creation Model
by Brian Thomas, M.S. *
Planets, including the earth, generate magnetic fields that encompass the space around them. Observations have shown that, like earth's, the planet Mercury's magnetic field is rapidly breaking down, and NASA's Messenger spacecraft confirmed that again earlier this year.
If the planets in the solar system are billions of years old, why do these magnetic fields still exist?
In 1974 and 1975, the Mariner 10 spacecraft measured Mercury's magnetic field strength with its onboard magnetometer and sent the data to earth. The astronomers analyzing the data at the time found that the average magnetic moment was 4.8 x 1022gauss cm3, which yields a field strength "about 1% that of the Earth."1
A decade later, creation physicist D. Russell Humphreys published a magnetic field model based on clues from the Bible. He reasoned that earth and the planets all shared a watery beginning, in accord with Genesis 1 and 2 Peter 3:5.2 He calculated what the magnetic field strength would have been at the creation by using a mass of aligned water molecules equal to the masses of each planet.
Then, he plotted the rate at which the magnetic fields would have diminished over the roughly 6,000 years since. Humphreys wrote, "Electrical resistance in a planet's core will decrease the electrical current causing the magnetic field, just as friction slows down a flywheel."3 The resulting model accurately predicted the magnetic field strengths of Uranus and Neptune, as well as the declining strength of Mercury's field.4
In 2008, Messenger flew past Mercury and captured a magnetic field measurement, and Humphreys compared it with the decaying slope generated by his creation model. Sure enough, Mercury's magnetic field strength had diminished since 1974, right in line with the predicted value of the creation magnetic field model.
If Mercury's magnetic field is supposed to have lasted for many millions of years, then it should be very stable over vast time periods. But as Messenger's data show, researchers can measure its decay within a person's lifetime.
Humphreys wrote, "My predicted 4% decrease in only 33 years would be very hard for evolutionary theories of planetary magnetic fields to explain, but a greater decrease would be even harder on the theories."3 He anticipated more accurate 2011 measurements, which Science published on September 30.
The Science authors wrote that the field strength for Mercury is "~27% lower in magnitude than the centered-dipole estimate implied by the polar Mariner 10 flyby."5 This confirms that Mercury's magnetic field is rapidly diminishing, which in turn confirms that the field must only be thousands of years old—just as the creation model predicts.
References
- Ness, N. F. 1979. The magnetic field of Mercury. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors. 20 (2-4): 209-217.
- Humphreys, D. R. 1984. The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields. Creation Research Society Quarterly. 21 (3): 140-149.
- Humphreys, D. R. 2008. Mercury's magnetic field is young! Journal of Creation. 22 (3): 8-9.
- Humphreys, D. R. 1990. Beyond Neptune: Voyager II Supports Creation. Acts & Facts. 19 (5).
- Anderson, B. J. et al. 2011. The Global Magnetic Field of Mercury from MESSENGER Orbital Observations. Science. 333 (6051): 1859-1862.
Image credit: NASA
* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
Article posted on October 26, 2011. Article updated October 30, 2011.
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Once a law of science is established it is supposed to remain a law until it is disproven. No one has disproven the Law of Biogenesis and the article below will include links that demonstrate why this is true. There are hard chemical barriers to prevent the raw materials aka building blocks of life from forming in nature AND there is no source for the information found in organisms NOR is there any natural source for designing all the molecular machines found in organisms...So one has to ask why anyone would just toss out a law of science? Obviously for unscientific metaphysical reasons!
Posted on August 22, 2013 in Dumb Ideas, Intelligent Design, Philosophy of Science, SETI
Origin-of-life researchers assume that intelligently-designed experiments in the lab can inform them about the emergence of life without design – in short, that design proves non-design.
Life uses chemistry; that’s not controversial. What’s at
issue is whether abiotic reactions on a primitive earth led to life without
design. Observing chemistry in the lab cannot speak to that question
logically. Astrobiologists assume that experiments they design for small
portions of their story can be strung together into “scenarios” about life’s
origin without design. It doesn’t follow. No one stage logically
leads to another. If each step is improbable, the improbabilities grow with
each added step, becoming vanishingly small quickly. Maintaining the
story requires ample insertion of imagination —the very thing the scientific
method was intended to overcome. (Anyone can imagine that a scenario
“could” happen. Science seeks demonstrable proof.)
Moreoever, astrobiologists never entertain serious criticisms
from those outside their field; i.e., from experts who do not believe life
could have emerged naturally. All their squabbles are internal. It
creates a self-reinforcing belief in naturalism, with disagreement only in the
details. Naturalism itself becomes immune to falsification. In addition,
astrobiology literature is rife with oversimplification and extrapolation,
seasoned with hedging words about what “could” happen or “might” happen.
A few recent examples showcase these logical fallacies.
Kick-starting life: The leading controversy in origin-of-life
theories these days concerns whether metabolism came first or genetics came
first (see the two falsify each other in our 1/26/08 entry).
The metabolism-first view of Michael Russell at JPL is getting good
press these days (see 12/03/04 and 2/15/08).
He claims that chemical reactions at hydrothermal vents started chain reactions
that life later co-opted for metabolism. Using a kick-starting metaphor, Astrobiology
Magazine claims that “Three new papers strengthen the case the life on
Earth first began at alkaline hydrothermal vents at
the bottom of the oceans.” Russell co-authored all three of these papers,
so it’s no wonder they strengthen the case for his belief. He claims his
theory is testable, but the only thing he is testing is his
intelligently-designed apparatus. The observable present-day chemistry of
vents, or the formation of acetate, does not logically concern the origin of
life. Imagination replaces demonstration with the use of the “could”
word:
Once this early chemical pathway was forged, acetate could become
the basis of other biological molecules.
They also describe how two kinds of “nano-engines”
that create organic carbon and polymers — energy currency of the first cells — could have
been assembled from inorganic minerals.
The question is, who is the kicker? In evolutionary
theory, there is no mind or goal. If acetate formed at a hydrothermal
vent, nobody was guiding it toward bigger and better things.
Giving vent to imagination: In a PNAS commentary,
Rogier Braakman of the Santa Fe Institute attempted to support the
metabolism-first scenarios at hydrothermal, again with ample use of the “could”
word:
- In particular,
much remains unknown about what forms of prebiotic organic chemistry could have been possible at vents, and
whether they could have produced abundant biological
precursors.
- Several authors
have argued (5–8 [including Russell]) that on the early Earth, this would have created a global network of
geochemical reactors that could have seeded life by generating and trapping
organic substrates from simple inorganic inputs.
- While providing
an attractive conceptual framework, the strength of such
arguments will ultimately depend on experiments that confirm that
prebiotic chemistry at hydrothermal vents could have indeed
produced analogs of pathways seen in modern metabolism.
- Studies of this
sort can thus help improve our understanding of
the variability of prebiotic chemistry within
and across hydrothermal vents while also making it possible to consider how the parallel activation of
different (sub)networks at different vent locations could have allowed access to pathways
not possible under single environmental conditions.
- Mass
concentration within abiotic networks was likely important,
because if matter was distributed over too many different pathways it could have significantly decreased the
likelihood of more complex structures and functions emerging.
- Thus, even if
total abundances of such organic inputs were high, scenarios depending on them require plausible mechanisms to explain how only
small subsets of compounds could have
been selected out of highly distributed sets to become part of living systems.
- If instead metabolism emerged directly from geochemical
networks with inorganic inputs, and studies indicate that the number of
significantly contributing pathways at hydrothermal vents was likely
somewhat limited, then the sparseness of metabolism could in part be a reflection of the
sparseness of hydrothermal geochemistry.
Before he died in 2007, Leslie Orgel (veteran origin-of-life
researcher with Stanley Miller of spark-discharge fame) gave at least 15 reasons
why metabolism-first scenarios will not work (1/26/08).
None of them were addressed in this new article. The prior year, James
Shapiro gave equally potent reasons why genetics-first scenarios will not work (2/15/07).
Flowery rhetoric is not enough: PhysOrg gave
ample space to another believer in metabolism-first scenarios, Elbert Branscomb
from the University of Illinois, an admirer of Russell’s vent hypothesis.
“Cracking how life arose on Earth may help clarify
where else it might exist,”
the headline reads, using three hedging words in one sentence. The
grinning face of Branscomb, and his colorful prose (“The answer should help us discover what
is truly necessary to spark the fateful transition from the lifeless to the living,
and thereby, under what conditions and with what likelihood it might happen
elsewhere”) cannot compensate for his illogic. In a single bound,
Branscome leaps from the thermodynamics of hydrothermal vents to the intricate
machinery of life that produces ATP, as if that is how “life got launched,”
given “a free
gift of geochemistry on a wet, rocky, and
tectonically-active planet.” From there, Branscomb launched himself into
an egregious display of personification:
“It’s only later when life set out to take its
act on the road that it had to figure out how
to make its own membranes, pump protons uphill across these new membranes, tap
into other sources of energy to do the pumping, etc.,” Branscomb said. “But once hooked on the free
stuff, the trans-membrane proton gradient in particular, life never broke the habit.
And here
we are, every living thing, still frantically pumping protons
as if just staying alive depends on it—which it does.”
This dreamer was rewarded with an $8 million five-year grant to
the University from the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the article
said. (He claims his hypothesis is testable, but again, he’s only testing
observable chemistry, not the origin of life.) The comments at the end of
the article degenerated into name-calling, with angry evolutionists flinging
Bible-thumping accusations against one who simply pointed out the improbabilities.
Lewis and Clark they’re not: Fresh with more government
money from the Lewis and Clark Fund, some young researchers are traveling the
world for evidence of life on other planets. That’s right; they are
assuming, illogically,
that they can “Use
Earth to Understand Possible Life in the Universe,” according
to Space.com.
Out they journey, looking for evidence of early oxygen and other things, on the
only planet in the universe where life is known to exist. As much fun as
these free vacations might be, they cannot logically speak to the origin of
life on other planets from a sample of one. “The Lewis and Clark
Fund for Exploration and Field Research in Astrobiology is supported by the NASA Astrobiology
Institute and the American Philosophical Society (APS),” Michael Shirber of NASA’s
Astrobiology Institute wrote, noting that the APS also had a role in
the original Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. (That journey, though,
was not trying to discover life on other planets.) One young researcher
was so happy to take part, he said (with “could”), “The fact that other planets,
which are seemingly inhospitable from a distance, could in
fact have a prolific biosphere that is actively shaping their environment blows me away.”
In science, no amount of emotion can justify an illogical conclusion.
SETI self-refutation: Another Space.com article
about SETI used the same non-sequitur fallacy,
arguing that research into whale songs can inform them about life in outer
space. Drake equation in hand, describing the history and current status
of “SETI Evolution,” writer Laurence Doyle of the SETI Institute
unwittingly stumbled onto an argument for intelligent design (without calling
it that):
But a new SETI idea is even farther out than that.
The idea is that there is a SETI-type “calling card” in
the human genome. In order for this to be isolated, one would have to show that
this particular region in the human (or perhaps another species’) genome was not just non-random (any process with a
rule structure of any kind is non-random), but that this certain region of the
genome was incompatible with the processes that shaped or altered the present
genome. The idea is that if a region of the human genome could be shown to not be likeany
other parts of the genome, and — much more difficult — to not be
producible by natural selection, for example, then it would
have to have been made by a pre-human and very advanced
intelligence. I think information theory here would
be very useful, as one could perhaps isolate regions of
the genome that had unusual structure.
From there, he pondered what alien intelligences might be
thinking, apparently unaware that if alien intelligences could leave artifacts
of their presence that we humans could discern, then design detection is a
legitimate scientific approach for viewing the genome.
The perhapsimaybecouldness
index (PCMI) of these articles is off the charts. We invite you to
re-read a commentary from 5/22/2002 about
why individual parts of their scenario cannot logically support the scenario,
using the analogy of a helicopter holding a girder over a canyon as a
“possible” part of a bridge.
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Evidence! The idea of a discipline of science termed "astrobiology" is utterly ridiculous! There is no evidence for life on any other planet but this one. How do you feel about millions upon millions of your tax dollars being spent on Darwinist daydreams? Why don't we spend this money on fighting cancer or eliminating leukemia or working on reducing the accumulation of mutations in our genome? Contrary to Darwinist propaganda, mutations are mistakes and they are a problem for all of mankind. As we accumulate more mutations, we find more diseases and syndromes and allergies to deal with and eventually mutations will kill us. Mutations do not build, they break and we should be working on ways to fight THAT instead of pointing radio telescopes at the skies hoping ET will call or fanciful attempts to figure out a way to defy established scientific law!!!
Check out Genetic Entropy here...and also here.